Here's a blog where I post my sketches, WIP's, finished work, and anything relevent to my art. My official website is www.kirstenzirngibl.com.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Lots has happened...

...since the last post.
I'm still a student at TAD. Recently, the first entertainment 2D semester ended. 2 more to go!

I started a paid internship with Massive Black Shanghai (later renamed to Brilliant Colors LLC). I Just found out that ImagineFX magazine actually did publish a brief interview with me about it. One of the reasons I haven't posted any updates is because most of the work I've been doing has been NDA. All the work I've done for them so far has been for Riot Software (League of Legends). I've been doing splash illustration work for them, as well as character design (new characters and reskins). There are now several people alongside me, most other TAD students. We've had to learn to work as a group, passing different character designs and illustrations around. Also learning about working with clients and getting used to making a lot of changes... it's been a tremendous learning experience.

I'm on break from that now, and my latest endeavor is to develop my own world as a mobile adventure game, 3D navigation style through 2D images, like the old game Riven, and release a book at the same time (marketing strategy). Anyway, it's still in the planning stages. I want to have a sketch-style working prototype within the next couple of weeks, and have already gotten a good start with the pitchdoc. I'll be taking a break from art while I learn some scripting and work on some writing as well.

Also I'm catching up on TAD work I fell behind on when doing the Riot stuff, and will be posting that soon too.

In non-art news, I've just started playing Star Wars the Old Republic. So far, so awesome.

Anyway, I hope all my online friends are doing well and have their own set of exciting developments.

~Kirsten

^This is the first splash illustration I worked on for MB Shanghai (Brilliant Colors), for League of Legends (Riot).

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/

The original purpose of this illustration was to promote the re-designed Gangplank character and replace the old splash art.

I worked in it in a collaboration with Jon Neimeister (http://andantonius.deviantart.com/) and Alex Konstad (http://akonstad.deviantart.com/) under a tight deadline. Trying to be efficient with 3 people on 1 piece without "too many cooks in the kitchen" is challenging but can also be really rewarding. We all had a hand in it during all stages of the process. When you take out the lack of sleep and a few annoying client changes, it was a "blast" ^hahaha^

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Another splash, later done for League of legends' "Snowdown" event. This is the Christmas themed skin obviously. I didn't design the reskin
It was tricky because Maokai is a complicated, sort of "messy looking" character. Also, they wanted him in a cozy christmas living room, but since LoL is a fantasy game, I had to make it look recognizable but still not modern. Log cabin seemed to work as a bridge between modern and fantasy. It had to look cozy, but also dark and creepy. I dunno, maybe it's too dark.
Anyway, if you notice the painting on the wall to the left, it's actually Riot's 2011 Christmas login screen
I did this one on my own, though I got feedback from the group, including our art director, Randis Albion.
Anyway, Riot ended up making changes to this before it actually went on the website. This is what it ended up looking like: http://riot-web-static.s3.amazonaws.com/media/snowdown_showdown/skins/Maokai_Snowdown.jpg